Obama’s Real Plan: Soak the Middle Class

CALLER: Hey, your last caller was absolutely dead on. The Tea Party demonstrated in 2010 that they could remove every official down to dogcatcher, so what happened in 2012? Well, at the Republican convention, they locked out 568 delegates. How many millions of votes did that take? Obama got ten million fewer votes, and Romney arguably got less votes than McCain.

RUSH: Well, it wasn’t that many. I mean, it wasn’t ten million fewer. It was significant. I don’t think it was that many. You might be right. I don’t think it was that many.

CALLER: The Republican Party has lost their credibility. They attacked the Tea Party starting at the convention, and it materialized to everybody else after the election. They first dismissed all the Republican committee members. You know, this tax argument? We are so far in debt and on the verge of financially collapsing our dollar that this tax argument is relatively ridiculous at this point. And that’s what we’re focusing all of our time on.

RUSH: So tell me something.

CALLER: I mean, the Republican Party is in the middle of a total self-destruction.

RUSH: A serious question, because I think you may have a point: Why, then, are the Republicans so focused on having everybody know that they are willing to raise tax rates on the rich? What’s the deal?

CALLER: Well, I think at this point it’s a mute (sic) argument.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: They have to accept the Democratic’s (sic) offer of everybody below $250,000 otherwise they’re totally gonna self-implode. They’re gonna lose their moderates. I mean, the Republican Party has already attacked their base, and now they’re gonna lose their moderates. They’ve gotta get this issue off the table. They made their bed. Now they gotta sleep in it, get the issue off the table, and then let’s start talking about what real issues are out there. Because we’re not talking about it with tax increases. That’s a ridiculous argument.

RUSH: Well, what if I were to tell you that Boehner’s offer today, his Plan B, was just that: Get the tax issue off the table and start talking about spending cuts?

CALLER: Right. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing that the quasi-socialist president that we have now is not playing hardball. But what difference does it make at this point?

RUSH: No, no, that’s not what I’m saying. You sound like you’re very angry at the Republicans for turning on their own.

CALLER: Very. Absolutely.

RUSH: But then you follow that by saying, “They’ve gotta get taxes off the table so they don’t lose their moderates. They gotta talk about what really matters,” which is spending cuts, I assume, you think.

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: Why care what they do if they’ve so ticked you off? Aren’t they in the process of destroying themselves anyway?

CALLER: Exactly. Exactly, Rush. I’m at that point now. “Do we break away, do we go third party, or do we try to take over the Republican Party?” And we’re under massive attack by what we believe to be physical (sic) conservatives. No, we’re the physical conservatives. They’re the RINOs. They aren’t even… Like the last caller said, they aren’t even proposing spending cuts, true spending cuts, true attempts to save our currency. They aren’t doing it. So where do we go? Do we go third party or do we try to take over the Republican Party? And that’s what’s frustrating to me.

RUSH: I’m not speaking in their defense here. I’m just telling you: They are looking at the election returns’ disproportionate results and what they see is a country that wants bigger government and more spending, and I think they want to get in on the deal.

CALLER: Well, that’s how we got here, Rush.

RUSH: I know. I’m not defending it.

CALLER: And that’s why we’re gonna collapse if we don’t correct it. So you say go back to your morals, go back to your values, when there is no answer. Well, your values isn’t —

RUSH: I said “principles.”

CALLER: Okay, principles. Okay.

RUSH: Political principles.

CALLER: Right. Well, that’s not compromising and playing this game. Get the issue off the table.

RUSH: I understand that.

CALLER: You made your bed. Sleep in it, deal with it, take it off the table and let’s start talking about real issues. That’s where I’m at with it, and IÂ’m still confused.

RUSH: I appreciate that. Okay. I understand.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: A couple of sound bites here. I mentioned Plan B earlier, John Boehner essentially proposing the Nancy Pelosi plan to Obama to avoid the fiscal cliff. If you weren’t with us, essentially what Boehner did was offer to increase tax rates on all income over a million dollars. Income under a million is exempted, no tax increase. For Obama the number is $250,000. Pelosi in April suggested a million. Chuck Schumer in 2010 suggested a million. The White House rejected it practically before Boehner’s presser was over. Here’s the White House press secretary.

CARNEY: The so-called Plan B that’s been put out there achieves nothing like what a bigger deal would do, and you would lose — by just extending current laws for those making under a million dollars, you would lose — hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue relative to the decoupling the president has proposed. A significant portion of that money, if not most, would go to millionaires! Because when you extend tax cuts for those making under $250,000 or those making under $400,000, everybody who makes more than that benefits from those tax cuts. If you extend the tax cuts for everybody making up to a million dollars, everybody making more than that gets a significant tax cut on their first million dollars in earnings. So the proposal, essentially, is to give another big tax cut (snickers) to the wealthiest Americans. You saw Leader Pelosi say that Democrats would not vote for it.

RUSH: Well, she mighta said that, but it was her idea!

Now, that might have been hard for you to follow. Let me explain what he’s talking about here. It’s basically the definition of a marginal rate. For example, the rich pay a marginal tax rate of, let’s say, 36% right now. It’s 35.9%, so say 36%. But they don’t pay that on all of their income. On the first $50,000 they might pay whatever the rate is, 15%. And then the next bracket they’ll pay 20%.

Under Obama’s plan, once you get to $250,000, every dollar over that would be taxed at the new rate of 39.6%. What Carney’s saying here is that Boehner’s plan does two things wrong as far as we’re concerned. A, it gives people who make up to a million dollars no tax increase, “and that will cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars,” he said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars! It’s outrageous!

“It will cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars if we exempt all income up to a million dollars from any tax increase.” But then he said the rich get another tax cut because the first million they earn would not be taxed at the new tax rate. So if somebody earns $10 million, only $9 million of it would be taxed at the new rate. And he said, “We can’t do that.” So he’s saying that a massive tax increase on the rich is actually a tax cut for them.

Now, even if we get Obama’s plan, all income over $250,000 taxed at 39.6%, you would raise enough money to run the government 11 days. We’re not talking serious revenue here in the first place. This is all about politics. It’s all about expanding government. It’s all about shrinking the private sector. It’s about redistribution of wealth. It’s not about revenue. It is not about the government having more money to operate. It’s not about deficit reduction.

We’re not talking about nearly enough money for there to be any deficit reduction, particularly when you add to it all of the new spending that’s scheduled. These are just outrageous misstatements of fact, and they’re designed to make the low-information voter (who used to be called morons) think that there’s enough money there. The objective really is, if you want to boil it down to its essence…

What the White House wants the nation’s morons — ahem, low-information voters — to believe is that we would not have a deficit or a national debt if the rich were paying their fair share. I mean, you boil it all down, that’s their message. “And if we just raise taxes on the rich, we’re not gonna have any deficits and we’re not gonna have a national debt. There’s real deficit reduction.” They want people to believe this.

When, in fact, we’re talking about so little money in relation to deficit reduction that it would run the government for 11 days. I’m sorry, there’s just no deficit reduction in that. In fact, you could confiscate — not tax, you could confiscate — every dollar that everybody has over a million dollars. You could confiscate it, not tax it. Tax it at a hundred percent, and you would run the government for no more than a month.

You might not even get a month out of it. I tell you this, ladies and gentlemen, so that you will know unequivocally: There is no amount of money being held by the so-called rich that, if it were all transferred to government, would make an iota’s worth of difference in a government that overspends and a debt that’s being racked up. There just isn’t enough money on the table that we’re talking about here.

So it’s not about that.

But Obama does want you to believe that the only reason we have a deficit is because the rich are getting away with not paying their fair share. So any deal that Boehner offers is gonna be rejected because the objective here is to wipe out the rich, ultimately. The objective is to eliminate them. That’s what Obama is actually aiming for over many, many years. So Carney comes up with this convoluted explanation that the rich are getting two tax cuts with Boehner’s proposal.

When in fact they aren’t. The rich would see a massive tax increase with Boehner’s proposal. And the fact the White House is rejecting it ought to speak volumes to you. Boehner has offered exactly what Obama says he wants, and Obama is rejecting it. He’s offered more, in fact, on the tax side. He’s offered more than Obama has asked for, in one instance. By the way, Carney got a question from the AP reporter, Ben Feller. He said, “Look, is it the president’s view that he can’t get a big deal unless he goes up?”

CARNEY: This requires compromise, and that’s why we have moved and reduced our revenue target and moved from 250 to 400. The point that the president had always made is that it is not his preferred option, but he knew that he would have to compromise in order to reach an agreement, without sacrificing the principles that are clear. And that is that we have to have balance. It has to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay more so that the burden isn’t unduly placed on seniors and students and families who have children with disabilities and others, and that’s what his current proposal maintains.

RUSH: There it is again. Families with children with disabilities. There it is again, folks. He’s throwing it in. So the Adam Lanza-type family, we can’t put the burden on them. The rich have got to pay more. It’s gotta be balanced. We have to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay more so that the burden isn’t unduly placed. Where this is all going to end up, I’m pretty sure — we’ll see if I’m right; won’t be too long, maximum next year sometime, maybe two years — where this is all going to end up is that the middle class is going to get soaked. The middle class is going to see their taxes go up, and the reason is, that’s where the bulk of the money is.

You could confiscate all the money the middle class has and run the government for quite a while. Much longer than if you confiscate all the money the rich have. There’s a reason why the rich are called the top 2%. There aren’t very many of them, folks. They’re only the top two, the top 1%. And the idea that 98% of the country is not going to have a tax increase under this president is absurd. Everybody is going to see a tax increase under this president, because his objective is to shrink the private sector and expand the government so that the government becomes the primary source of prosperity and benefits for the vast majority of people.

That’s the objective. And the only way he can bring that about is to take as much money out of the private sector as possible so that no matter what job you have it’s simply not gonna pay enough to allow you to get by without some government assistance. That’s his objective. That’s what he wants. He wants as many people needing government benefits and assistance as possible. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Why would anybody want that?” Well, you have to try to understand the power that somebody like Obama salivates for. You have to try to understand the desire. Think Sauron in Lord of the Rings. That’s what we’re dealing with here.

Power is everything. Power is perpetual. Power perpetuates itself. FDR tried it. He tried to set the Democrat Party up so that it would never, ever lose its power. And that’s what Obama is attempting to do now. And the simplest way to do that is to simply take as much money out of the private sector, meaning where people live and work, as possible. So there’s less to have. There’s less to go around. A shrinking pie, if you will.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, let me say one thing. The opportunity here to get confused in this debt deal and the fiscal cliff is huge. There’s something that I think needs to be stated and understood. There is not a single tax cut being proposed as we speak. There is nobody, no Republican, no Democrat that is talking about tax cuts. There aren’t any. The reason I’m making a big deal out of this is that Jay Carney and his sound bite from the White House just now, rejecting John Boehner’s latest proposal, is filled with lies about how the Republicans are cutting taxes for the rich. I want you to understand, there are no tax cuts. There are no tax cuts contemplated. There are no tax cuts scheduled.

We have current tax rates. They have been the same since 2003. These tax rates were put into place by an agreement that Congress made with George Bush. They are to this day called the Bush tax cuts, but they are not tax cuts. They were at the moment they were passed because the new rates were smaller than what existed in 2003. But they have been the effective tax rates since 2003. There are no tax cuts, my friends. So when you hear Jay Carney or anybody in the media, or anybody on a cable TV show talking about the Bush tax cuts, there aren’t any tax cuts. And nobody has proposed a tax cut.

What is going to happen on January 1st is that the current tax rates are going up. The question is, on who? If we go over the fiscal cliff, everybody’s income tax rates are going up. The capital gains tax rate is going up. There is a 1% — actually .9% — there is a 1% income tax surcharge on everybody for Obamacare, everybody, no matter what else happens. There is a 3.8% surcharge on capital gains, independent of whatever the tax rate is on capital gains, and that’s an Obamacare tax. So if nobody does anything, everybody’s taxes are going up potentially 4.8%. A 1% income surcharge on everybody for Obamacare, and a 3.8% surcharge on any capital gains. If you sell your house at a profit, if you sell a stock at a profit, in addition to whatever the capital gains rate is, add 3.8% to it. It’s an Obamacare tax. Both of these are.

The Republicans are not proposing tax cuts, and neither is President Obama. When he talks about tax cuts for the middle class as part of the deal, all he means is that the current tax rates will not go up for the middle class. But nobody is getting a tax cut. The president has not proposed one. The Democrat Party had not proposed one. And, sadly, the Republicans have not proposed one. So when you hear people talk about a middle-class tax cut with the fiscal cliff, there isn’t one. It is political doublespeak. It exists by continuing to call the current rates the Bush tax cuts and then claiming that people who will not see a tax increase are getting a tax cut, when they aren’t. Their rates are going to stay the same. There is no tax cut anywhere for anybody any time on the table.